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Mechanical Technology — November-December 2016
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On the cover
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“
T
he thyssenkrupp brand is
well known in Africa for
its ‘pit-to-port’ mining and
materials handling solu-
tions and its turnkey cement plants, but
the Industrial Solutions business area
among others also combines leading
know-how in the fields of chemicals,
fertilisers, oil & gas and electrolysis. It
also has a long and successful history in
developing and supplying sugar plants,
boiler installations and power plants,
especially in India,” begins Steyn.
Spanning the comprehensive range
of plant solutions and equipment is
the company’s service offering, with
the thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions
Service Centre in Chloorkop at its heart.
Originally equipped with the capacity to
manufacture and refurbish the largest
Polysius-branded HPGRs (high-pressure
grind rolls) in the thyssenkrupp range, the
facility has CNC vertical and horizontal
machining centres capable of handling
100 t components – “and we have just
improved and refurbished an HPGR
for a diamond mine in Gauteng,” says
Lamprecht.
Today, all thyssenkrupp Industrial
Solutions’ business lines are supported
through the Service Centre, as well
as through field and onsite presences.
“Refurbishments, new and replacement
parts and wear part manufacturing,
fabrication and machining for any of our
equipment offerings can be done locally
and quickly through our Service Centre,”
he continues. “We hold and manufacture
spares, support the field services teams
and are available 24/7 for breakdowns,
shut-downs and product support.
“We also offer technical training and
we can take full responsibility for plant
uptime via customised integrated asset
management (IAM) contracts, through
which we can operate and maintain
industrial plants and/or equipment,” he
assures.
“We provide services that cut across
all of the pit-to-port, cement, process
plant and power equipment solutions
that we offer,” adds Steyn. “Our inte-
grated service offering makes us unique
in that a huge variety of industrial plant
equipment can be serviced from a single
source,” he says.
Power solutions for emerging
markets
Power and Energy is a recent introduc-
tion to thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions’
sub-Saharan African product offering.
“Globally, this is a strong division in its
own right,” says Barkhuizen, adding that,
in India, thyssenkrupp has over 200
installations.
“The offering includes three core
technologies: coal-based circulating
fluidised-bed combustion (CFBC) plants
of between 20 and 150 MW per unit;
biomass boiler installations for the likes
of renewable power plants including the
sugar and pulp & paper industries; and
waste recovery plants for industrial en-
Peter Middleton
talks to the general managers of thyssenkrupp Industrial
Solutions in South Africa – Jacques Steyn, GM for Materials Handling; Wilfred
Barkhuizen, GM for Minerals Processing, Power and Energy; and Ruben
Lamprecht, Services GM – about the company’s comprehensive equipment
and service offerings and the introduction of its power solutions into Africa.
thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions GMs: Wilfred Barkhuizen, Minerals Processing, Power and Energy;
Jacques Steyn, Materials Handling; and Ruben Lamprecht, Services.
From pit waste to power:
solutions
ergy users wishing to reduce the specific
energy associated with their production
processes,” he tells
MechTech
.
The core application for the biomass
technology in India lies primarily in the
sugar industry, which uses large amounts
of steam for the extraction process and,
from the cane residue, produces a dry
waste product called bagasse, which is
an ideal fuel for thermal plants.
Cold-cyclone CFBC technology first
entered thyssenkrupp through a collabo-
ration in the late eighties with Deutsche
Babcock Germany and thyssenkrupp
Industries India (tkII). The technology
was widely adopted for captive power
generation/co-generation applications
and, in India to date, thyssenkrupp has
over 55 CFBC boilers commissioned and
15 in various stages of execution.
“Most utility-scale power stations in
South Africa use pulverised coal to ensure
complete and efficient combustion. CFBC
power stations operate at lower combus-
tion temperatures and can use much
lower quality coal, including discard coal
that is normally regarded as unusable,”
says Barkhuizen.
How does it work? Instead of being
pulverised, the coal is simply crushed to
a size of less than 8.0 mm. It is then fed
onto a fluidised bed on the boiler floor.
Air is blown up into the bed from below,
which suspends and agitates the fuel,
resulting in large fuel particles circulating
in the bed. Smaller particles are blown
into the furnace and are captured with a